“Away, Stand off, I say”: Women’s Appropriations of Restraint and Constraint in The Birth of Merlin and The Devil is an Ass
Sarah E. Johnson
McMaster University
johnsse@mcmaster.ca
S.E. Johnson. '“Away, Stand off, I say”: Women’s Appropriations of Restraint and Constraint in The Birth of Merlin and The Devil is an Ass'. Early Modern Literary Studies 15.1 (2009-10). <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/15-1/johnaway.htm>.
- Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens ends with a provocative image:
twelve virtuous queens, played by Queen Anne herself and eleven noblewomen, progress
in triumph with the antimasque’s unruly “hags” or witches bound before their
chariots. While mythological creatures pull the chariots, the positioning of
the restrained hags before the attendant torch-bearers creates an image
of the hags drawing the chariots as well (472-8).[1] Even if they do not
actively pull the chariots, the hags’ capture is the very reason – the real
fuel or energy – behind the queens’ stately public procession. This image
powerfully suggests, as several critics have noticed, that far from destroying
the hags’ transgressive energy, vividly expressed only moments before in their
dance involving “strange fantastical motions of their heads and bodies,” and
utterly “contrary to the custom of men,” the victorious queens actually harness
and make use of that energy (Queens 327-332).[2]
- In addition to the hags’ transgressive sexuality (a quality which
the queens, with their revealing costumes, share[3]),
anger is a significant component of their unruly energy. The ingredients of the
hags’ charms, such as “breath” “sucked” from a sleeping child (159-160), an
infant’s “fat” procured with a “dagger” (162-163), a “sinew” “bit[ten] off” a
corpse (166-168), eyes “scratched out” of an owl (184), and so on (142-190), while
reflecting popular beliefs about witchcraft, are also the fruits of startling
violence. The hags gather to “let rise / Our wonted rages” (123-124), and the
Dame’s “rage begins to swell” the more her words go unheeded (279). Anger,
perceived as a just and often necessary response to provocation when expressed
by men, was considered one of two extremes in women, childish and irrational, or
dangerously destructive, so that the more openly women expressed their angry
frustration, the more easily it could be either dismissed or condemned (Kennedy
3-12; 20-1). The image of the bound hags – figures for transgressive female sexuality
and emotion -- under the control of the queens, then, arguably represents
women’s strategic use of restraint and constraint as a source of increased power
and agency in their relationships with men. When freely venting their fury the
hags appear repulsive and ineffective (their charms never do succeed), but when
carefully harnessed, their energies affirm the queens’ potency as rulers and
increase the queens’ mobility within the public sphere. As powerful women who
hold on to the witches instead of destroying them or turning them over to the
custody of men, the queens essentially co-opt and sequester a negative view of
themselves. Beginning with Penthesilia, Queen of the Amazons, Heroic Virtue presents
us with eleven female political leaders known for their independence from men and
for their military prowess (Queens 375-385). These “brave” and “bold” queens’
historic involvement in the political sphere paired with their engagements in
violence on the battlefield, both conventionally male domains, might well be
interpreted as unnatural, even monstrous (especially given the Amazons’
practice of removing a breast to facilitate their use of weapons in combat),
and so could easily earn them the title of “hags” had their actions as
warrior-queens failed to secure their institutionalized power (375, 385).
- In Jonson’s masque, the warrior-queens’ active appropriation of restraint
is quite different from passively complying with contemporary gender codes that
imposed on women both the restraint and constraint of unruly sexuality and
emotions. I take up these two terms not as identical, but as complimentary,
“constraint” referring to an internal, immaterial check or restriction of
emotions, thoughts, and desires likely to be read as inappropriate for women in
their full expression, and “restraint” referring to the physical confinement of
the body, whether within marriage (in terms of one, exclusive physical
relationship), within the walls of the home, or within actual physical bindings.
Of course, as I am defining these terms, “restraint” and “constraint” are
complexly interrelated (various forms of literal restraint could be used to
enforce internal constraint, for instance), and the masque’s image of queens
and hags begins to suggest this complexity, with the physical restraint of the
hags functioning as part of the queens’ internal constraint and carefully controlled
expression of the same transgressive energies the hags embody. Rather than
suggesting a facile distinction between “restraint” and “constraint,” then, I
use both terms with the aim of maintaining an awareness of how various forms of
restriction and confinement women confronted and manipulated operate on both
physical and mental levels in ways not easily extricable.
- I have begun with this intriguing image from The Masque of Queens
because, as I will argue, the representations of women in both Jonson’s The
Devil is an Ass and Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin[4] could be crystallized
or condensed into this very image. At first, though, The Devil is an Ass
and The Birth of Merlin might seem odd plays to compare. The Devil is
an Ass satirizes contemporary London city-life with the help of the
bumbling Pug, a novice-devil desperate to prove his mettle to Satan. Pug is
permitted to possess the body of a newly hanged thief and try his hand at
luring souls to hell. As Satan warns, however, Londoners have become so
sophisticated in their new vices and fashions that hell can hardly keep up. Pug
is soon begging to return to hell as a safe-haven from the wildly abusive
Fitzdottrel – one of those whom Pug originally set out to corrupt but who
proved already more corrupt than the new devil could handle. The projector
Merecraft and his colleagues, however, prove quite capable of ‘handling’
Fitzdottrel for their own financial benefit. The obsessively jealous
Fitzdottrel imposes strict physical confinement on his wife Frances, who
helplessly watches him squander her fortune on Merecraft’s scams. Amidst all
the scheming, devilry, and the licentious ladies Tailbush and Eitherside’s
vacuous discourse about fashion and cosmetics, help comes to Frances in the form of the witty, charming gentleman Wittipol. Frances is not a Pug in need of rescue,
however, and defines what ‘help’ is before accepting Wittipol’s services.
- In contrast to the critical and comic focus on Jonson’s London, Rowley’s play provides a version of Britain’s imagined history that begins before
Merlin’s birth and stretches forward, through Merlin’s prophecies, to the time
of King Arthur. The Birth of Merlin draws on Arthurian legend and
mythical history about struggles for power between the Britons and Saxons. It
dramatizes sensational events surrounding Merlin’s own unusual birth with a
full beard and set of teeth, son to the devil and the countrywoman Joan
Go-To-’T. The play intricately weaves together “four clear plot lines,” which
Megan Lynn Isaac concisely identifies as “Constantia’s and Modesta’s romances,
Joan’s attempt to find a father for her child, Aurelius’s and Uter’s
entanglements with Artesia, and Vortigern’s struggle to hold the kingdom”
(110).
- The Birth of Merlin was performed in
1622, [5] and so within six years
of Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, performed
in the autumn of 1616. Despite the differences in genre and scope between these
two Jacobean plays, a compelling reason for their comparison lies within each
play’s representation of female success and empowerment in a way that resonates
with the masque’s image of queens roping hags to their chariots. As I will
discuss in detail, both plays show us men who try obsessively to closet ‘their’
women, but who fail when the women manage to redirect that impulse in order to
advantageously constrain and restrain themselves, or in other words, to
sequester and harness the power of ‘negative’ (according to conventional gender
norms), alternative, selves, without being soiled by patriarchal imperatives.
- A further intriguing similarity between these two plays is that in both,
the themes of constraint / restraint and magic repeatedly intersect at points
where the future courses of female characters’ lives are determined. Whether
they are being physically, emotionally, or intellectually isolated from the
rest of society, Modesta, Constantia, and Artesia in Merlin, and Frances
Fitzdottrel in Devil, make use of their constraint and restraint,
either as a shield against the seductive and exploitive ‘magic’ of others, or as
an impenetrable (because socially sanctioned) base from which to extend their
own ‘magical’ influence. Each play’s representations of women suggest that
patriarchal attempts to restrain women – whether to the weakness of the body,
within traditional roles that supported the status-quo, or from exercising
significant political power – could be co-opted into an effective means of
resisting and subverting male authority.
- The feat of using restraint and constraint to resist male agendas is
set into relief and problematized in both plays by other female characters
for whom this feat is out of reach. Just as Jonson’s queens achieve empowerment
and mobility at the expense of other women representing a lower social class,
both Merlin and Devil construct portraits of sophisticated women
who can turn restraint to their advantage by contrasting them to women who
cannot. While this juxtaposition serves to foreground a particular vision of
female empowerment, it should certainly caution us against idealizing female
success in the plays. In Rowley’s play, Merlin magically confines his mother,
Joan Go-to-’t, within his “Bower” after rescuing her from his father, the
devil, who meant to force an unwilling Joan to serve as “Quench to [his] lust”
(5.1.90, 34). The devil’s magic, namely his disguise as a fashionable
gentleman, “bewitch[ed]” Joan once before, resulting in the birth of Merlin,
the son a ‘reformed’ Joan can now only “name” “with my deepest sorrow,” and the
son who decides she will remove to “a place retir’d” to “dwell with solitary
sighs” (4, 89-91). While Merlin’s plan for his mother seems in keeping with her
plea for “help” and her entreaties that “darkness cover me” and “Sweet death
deliver me,” a verbal expression of gratitude or even agreement from Joan is
conspicuously absent (52, 16, 27). Significantly, both of Joan’s wishes for
oblivion come immediately after the devil reminds her of their son as a link
between them. Perhaps it is difficult for Joan to express gratitude when the
son she wishes she could forget about confines her “To weep away this flesh you
have offended with, / And leave all bare unto your aierial soul” – a punishment
that would seem to involve never forgetting, and which is just the inverse of
Joan’s plea, “Oh rot my memory before my flesh” (93-4, 24). Joan demonstrates
that failing to emotionally constrain and physically restrain oneself from the
temptations of another’s seductive magic and exploitive agenda – even once –
can quickly lead to an imposed form of permanent restraint.
- Ladies Tailbush and Eitherside in Devil do not face the solitude Joan faces in Merlin’s bower, but their ridiculous bodily trappings constitute a different form of confinement. These ladies think their ‘fashionable’ life “tastes more liberty” than other women’s lives because:
- Artesia,
Modesta, and Constantia in Merlin, and Frances in Devil, in contrast
to Joan, Tailbush, and Eitherside, manage to transform experiences of restraint,
performing understated magic acts of their own in plays full of flashy magic
events involving thunder and lightning, wands, possessing a corpse,
prophesying, and so on. Because Artesia, Modesta, and Constantia share the
stage with the legendary sorcerer Merlin, not to mention the earlier magicians
Anselme and Proximus, and the devil himself, these three women – despite being
accused of witchcraft – are not immediately obvious as practitioners of magic
in their own right. The same is true for Frances Fitzdottrel in Devil,
who shares the stage with Pug, the novice devil desperate to prove his mettle
during his excursion on earth; Iniquity, an outmoded Vice figure who
nonetheless materializes onstage fresh from hell; and Satan himself. But magic
is certainly not limited to these unmistakably supernatural figures. In fact,
the presence of blatantly magical elements in the plays alerts us to and encourages
us to consider a complex and often subtler discourse of magic that permeates
the entire plot. If we consider magic as an alternative, often secretive and
mysterious system of knowledge from that which is commonly accessible, and thus
as a powerful means of accessing an alternate reality when one’s current
situation is unsatisfying or desperate, then Artesia, Donobert’s daughters, and
Frances Fitzdottrel are all skilled in magic. And their magic is not the usual maleficia
we see in witchcraft plays, but a transformative magic that belongs more to
the early modern construction of magician-as-poet or stage-director that
Prospero exemplifies: their magic involves directing the course of their own
lives, and often through a skilful manipulation of language.
- In The Birth of Merlin, Artesia’s powers of enchantment
elicit the most violent reaction. Her presence is unnerving to King Aurelius’ counsellors,
who find their words powerless against the confounding influence Artesia’s
beauty has over the king (1.2.91-221).[7]
Artesia’s enemies progress from labelling her a “black devil” for her ability
to “so bewitch the king” (2.2.42-43) that he foolishly trusts the Saxons and
weds her (when he should be taking advantage of the Saxons’ defeat to secure
his kingdom against them), to a “witch by nature, devil by art” (3.6.87), when Artesia
turns the king against his own brother, to finally condemning her to a death
that clearly indicates their fear of her enchantments. They impose a triple
barrier between Artesia and the rest of society: she is to be starved (no
nourishment will pass the physical borders of her body), buried, and “circled
in a wall” all at once (5.2.65-66). Though Donobert’s response to Modesta’s and
Constantia’s unexpected refusal to marry their noble suitors is less extreme,
Donobert similarly accuses his daughters of being “inchanted with infected Spells,”
“bewitcht with error,” and thus dangerous to the social order (3.2.96, 112). In
a last desperate attempt to prevent Constantia from joining Modesta in a life of
religious seclusion, Donobert tellingly commands: “hear her no more Constantia,”
aware of the subversive and enchanting quality of Modesta’s words (3.2.111). In
contrast, in The Devil is an Ass, the witchcraft charge against Frances is more funny than serious for an audience fully aware that both the accuser, Fitzdottrel,
and the Justice who sides with him are merely self-centred fools. Nonetheless,
Merecraft, however immoral, is not a fool, and the fact that he is the one who initially
suggests levelling a witchcraft accusation at Frances is not insignificant:
with his skills as a manipulative projector, Merecraft senses that such an
accusation in connection with Frances is somehow fitting. With the possible
exception of Artesia, these female characters may not be immediately
recognizable as sorceresses alongside Merlin’s impressive prophecies or Satan’s
sulphurous exits, but other characters certainly perceive and often fear their
magic qualities.
- The
Birth of Merlin’s Modesta proves the strength of her magic qualities in a
contest with her father Donobert, which in some ways mirrors the play’s magical
contest between the rival wizards Anselme and Proximus. When her suitor Edwin’s
own “best skill” fails to woo Modesta (3.1.31), Donobert, convinced that
because Modesta “is a woman” she “will be won”(1.1.46), stages an illusion
designed to seduce her away from a life of religious enclosure and towards
marriage. Donobert twice refers to the ritualistic marriage procession that he
directs past the church porch where Modesta stands as his “trick” (3.1.32, 3.2.70).
Cador also calls the procession Donobert’s “trick” (3.2.137), and the illusion
is complete with “Lights and Musick” (3.1.37). This “trick” fails miserably
when Modesta’s words expose the emptiness of Donobert’s parade to the parade’s
chief participant, her sister Constantia:
Oh my good sister, I beseech you hear me,
Modesta achieves much more here than the exposure of Donobert’s procession as a false appearance. She attacks its very source, the real marriage ceremony it mimics, as merely one of many superficially appealing, and thus deceptive, “disguises” or “vizards” that belong to the transitory material world. Modesta warns Constantia that the family life to which marriage is a prelude guarantees nothing but sorrow, as it involves “seeing the fruit that we beget endure / So many miseries, that oft we pray / The Heavens to shut up their afflicted day” (3.2.106-108). She also warns that if Constantia becomes Cador’s wife, her “best” hope will be to “bring forth Heirs to die, / And fill the Coffins of our enemy” (3.2.109-110). These “powerful” words are pitted against Donobert’s use of spectacle (95). Indeed, Donobert’s instructions to Constantia, Cador, and all those in the procession to “pass on” before Modesta and “salute her not” emphasize his reliance on spectacle to enchant her (3.2.52, 54). By penetrating Donobert’s spectacle with her words, by piercing the “vizard” of his false parade to reveal genuine married life as “death’s glass beneath,” Modesta proves herself the stronger enchantress using the same tactic the Briton hermit and magician Anselme uses to assert his superiority over the Saxon magician Proximus. For Anselme does not attempt to outdo Proximus’ magic spectacle by conjuring a spectacle of his own. Instead, like Modesta, he dissolves Proximus’ illusion through his understanding of the source behind the spectacle. When Proximus is baffled that the spirits he summoned to impersonate Achilles and Hector flee at the mere sight of Anselme, Anselme criticizes him for failing to perceive that the source of his magic -- “hells unbottom’d depths,” cannot compare to Anselme’s source -- “that Power” who “onely can controul both hell and thee” (2.2.217-233). While Donobert is not explicitly connected with hellish spirits, his use of spectacle and illusion in an attempt to deceive certainly aligns him with Proximus in the play’s construction of parallel magic contests.
This world is but a Masque, catching weak eyes,
With what is not our selves but our disguise,
A Vizard that falls off, the Dance being done,
And leaves Deaths Glass for all to look upon,
Our best happiness here, lasts but a night,
Whose burning Tapers makes false Ware seem right;
Who knows not this, and will not now provide
Some better shift before his shame be spy’d. (3.2.84-92)
- As with Anselme, a figure
who embodies the connection between religion and magic in his status as both
holy hermit and “Prophet” (1.1.81), or “witch,”[8]
Modesta’s magic is also the magic of God. As a hermit, Anselme provides Modesta
with a model of seclusion from a worldly life.[9]
He does not stay long with Modesta and Edwin to deliberate upon Modesta’s
desire to take religious vows, but exits with the excuse “my contemplation
calls me, I must leave ye” (3.2.20), and Modesta recognizes and admires his
reclusiveness when she first addresses him by asking “may I without offence / Give
interruption to your holy thoughts?” (1.2.227-228). Modesta’s zeal for the
restraints of religious life, however, soon surpasses the hermit’s, and
significantly, so does her magic. Despite his propensity for secluded
contemplation, for instance, Anselme is quite prepared to bring his religious
fervour into the public sphere, aiding King Aurelius in battle with “clear and
glorious beams” of holy light (1.2.23), and voicing blunt political advice,
even when unsolicited, as when he warns the king that in marrying Artesia “Thou
hug’st thy ruin, and thy Countries woe” (1.2.184). In contrast, as Monica
Karpinska notes, Modesta’s desire to shut herself in a “nunnery” (5.2.3) incorporates
unmistakable “anti-war sentiment” (124-5), evinced by her comment that
childbearing only helps “fill the coffins of our enemy,” and by her rejection
of Edwin partly because she does not relish that he is “employ’d in blood and
ruine” (3.2.110, 1.1.33).
- Furthermore, whereas Anselme, “with his cross and staff” goes before
the marching troops and “boldly fronts the foe” (1.2.19-20), Modesta triumphs
over her father’s “trick” without moving from the church porch. [10] The juxtaposition of
Donobert’s moving procession with Modesta’s rootedness to one spot is significant.
Contrary to Gloster’s belief that “it now begins to work; this sight has moved
her,” Donobert’s procession does not sway Modesta in the least. Instead, from
her firm stance on the threshold of her chosen enclosure, Modesta brings
Donobert’s wedding march to a grinding halt; stillness conquers motion. Moreover,
Constantia’s decision to restrain herself from worldly life along with Modesta
seals Modesta’s victory in her magical contest with Donobert even more
resolutely than King Aurelius affirms Anselme’s victory over the Saxon magician
by advising Proximus to “give o’er your charms” (2.2.231). Where Anselme merely
defeats Proximus, who vows to “enforce new charms, / New spells, and spirits
rais’d from the low Abyss” (2.2.228-229), Modesta converts Constantia from
utterly “drown[ing] a sisters name” in her, to agreeing with her that they must
“seek eternal happiness in heaven, / Which all this world affords not” (3.2.67,127-128).
Conversion is a feat of which Anselme cannot boast, neither in the case of his
rival, Proximus, nor in the case of Aurelius in his decision to marry Artesia.
- Modesta, then, and later
Constantia, use a form of restraint subversively to achieve empowerment and
independence. The life of religious seclusion they choose is not particularly
subversive in itself; rather, it is a socially sanctioned option set in place
for women – or sometimes imposed on women – as an acceptable alternative to
marriage. What is subversive about the sisters’ choice is the fact that it is
not a “last resort,” but enthusiastically preferred over “worthy, devoted,
parentally approved” suitors (Isaac, 111). By committing to a life of religious
devotion, Constantia and Modesta actively choose one form of restraint instead
of passively accepting another, for the marriages pressed upon them might indeed
entail far worse restraints and constraints than the bodily renunciation of
earthly pleasures, as Frances Fitzdottrel’s miserable situation, married
to a doltish and abusive husband, demonstrates. The sisters define
themselves according to a legitimate role for women, just not the role Donobert
and his approved suitors envisioned for them.[11]
- Similarly, Modesta and
Constantia also define themselves according to their legitimate given names,
though clearly not in the way Donobert intended. Karpinska observes “the irony
of the sisters’ names” when, “changing [her] mind nearly in the midst of [her]
wedding ceremony,” Constantia appears to be anything but constant, and “readily
dismissing her suitor in front of both fathers in the first act,” Modesta is
“certainly not a woman who acts ‘shamefastly, bashfully’” (124). While the
sisters might not be constant to or modest before their father and suitors, nothing
suggests that they do not fulfil these names – definitions imposed on them, in
a sense – in their unexpected vocation. Indeed, we can add another layer to the
irony that Karpinska observes in the sisters’ names, in that “Modesta” and
“Constantia” seem perfect names for aspiring nuns. Anselme even remarks, when
Modesta is asking him to instruct her how to live a religious life, “your name
and vertues meet, a Modest Virgin, / Live ever in the sanctimonious way / To
Heaven and Happiness” (1.2.246-248). The sisters’ names are thus doubly ironic:
the sisters seemingly defy these names while in fact fulfilling them in the
extreme. This tactic parallels their rejection of the conventional social
obligations of marriage and childbearing through embracing extreme forms of
other qualities conventionally valued in women, chastity and piety. Isaac
describes the sisters’ decision as “baffling” (111). Indeed, their ability to transform
a socially sanctioned role that in other contexts might be oppressive and
restrictive for women, into an incontestable means of thwarting the will of men
who fully expect their compliance is undoubtedly baffling for Donobert, Edwin
and Cador. According to Isaac, “the audience,” like father and suitors, “experiences
[the sisters’] choice as disappointment” (111), but there is a danger in
assuming that all members of a playhouse audience would react in the same way.
I would argue that for some audience members, Modesta’s triumph in her contest
with her father, and the satisfying proof that Donobert is sadly mistaken in
his belief that as “a woman” Modesta “will be won,” far outweigh that
disappointment.
- By restraining themselves
to a life of religious seclusion, the sisters prove formidable figures able to
resist the seductive spectacle and “magic” of others - pressures that not only
Joan gives in to when she is at first taken with the devil’s “rich Attire, a
fair Hat and Feather, a gilt Sword, and most excellent Hangers” (2.1.15-16),
but that the king himself succumbs to, when, enchanted by Artesia’s beauty, he
endangers his kingdom by marrying her. The sisters bolster their position,
however, with a defence that neither Joan nor Aurelius initially raise against
their seducers – anger.
- The sisters do not in any
way lash out in rage against their father or suitors, but certainly a hint
of bitterness surfaces in Modesta’s revision of Edwin’s claim that she would lack
“faith” if she does not profess love to him. She asserts, instead, that
refraining from any such profession would show a lack of “credulity” and so would
be a sign of wisdom, not faithlessness (1.1.26-33). Arguably, resentment, both at
being answered for (Edwin is assuring Donobert that unless Modesta is faithless
she will agree to marry him), and at Edwin’s confident assumption that he knows
how Modesta feels about marriage, lies behind Modesta’s retort – especially given
her disapproving emphasis on what she perceives as an irreconcilable disparity
between the “heat of Loves desires” and Edwin’s recent, soldierly employment
“in blood and ruine” (30-33). Modesta at first tries to ease Edwin into her
decision with the consolation that if she were to choose a husband, it
would be him: “I do beseech you let this mild Reply / Give answer to your suit,
for here I vow / If e’re I change my virgin name, by you / It gains or looses”
(103-106). As Edwin persists in urging his suit, however, her replies become
less “mild.” Hearing Modesta tell Anselme of her intention to take religious
vows, Edwin asks “What meanes my Love? thou art my promis’d wife,” to which
Modesta answers more directly, “To part with willingly what friends and life / Can
make no good assurance of” (3.2.8-10). When begged to “recant thy vow,” she
bluntly responds with “Never: / This world and I are parted now for ever”
(12-14). Significantly, once Constantia sees from Modesta’s perspective, her
words to her father and suitor become just as abrupt and direct as her
sister’s. When Donobert, perceiving the persuasiveness of Modesta’s speech to
Constantia, orders Constantia to “leave her,” Constantia replies, “Then must I
leave all goodness, sir: away, / Stand off, I say” (112-114); when Cador
implores her to remember “thou art my promis’d Wife,” she impatiently dismisses
him with “Pray trouble me no further;” and when both beg to call her “daughter”
and “wife,” she deflects these bonds by telling them, plainly, “Your words are
air” (129-130, 140-142). Repeatedly, the sisters’ curt responses to their
father and suitors are responses that reject these men’s claims to them based
on conventional social obligations: as their father, Donobert claims their obedience,
and as approved suitors, Edwin and Cador claim their future devotion, but the
sisters will only recognize what they consider God’s claims to their obedience
and devotion.
- The hints of anger and impatience in the sisters’ responses,
surfacing most noticeably in Constantia’s bold command to her father to “stand
off,” and to her suitor not to “trouble” her, erect a double barrier to reinforce
the sisters’ religious enclosure. As Gwynne Kennedy explains, since anger involves assuming a position of judgment towards
another, it constitutes a form of “self assertion and a claim to possess equal
worth, despite [a woman’s] allegedly inferior status” (13). Not only do the
sisters assert equal worth with the men in their lives by refusing to obey
their wishes, they impatiently imply their superiority in perceiving something
that the men do not. Constantia’s comment that Cador and her father merely
“speak of want, to wealth, / And wish her sickness, newly rais’d to health”
tellingly conveys her sentiment of elevating herself above those she is leaving
behind (3.2.142-143). The sisters’ disobedience stemming from their assertion
of equality with and even superiority to their father and suitors certainly
creates distance between them, distance which Constantia’s angry demand that
her father “stand off” literalizes. But what further separates the sisters from
Donobert, Edwin, and Cador is also what distinguishes them from the hags and
aligns them with the queens in Jonson’s masque – the fact that they constrain
their anger. We only sense hints of it in their abrupt and uncompromising
responses to these men. A reason for this might be that “early modern moral and philosophical discourse on anger” not only
associated women with the body and emotions, but because of their supposed
inferior physiology considered them particularly susceptible to unruly
emotions, especially anger (Kennedy 1, 3, 5, 12). This same discourse gendered
the intellect, which was to govern the (feminine) emotions and body, as
masculine (Kennedy 4-5). Thus, women’s overt expressions of anger or
frustration could easily be, and often were, dismissed as irrational rebellion
against their preordained inferior status, and proof of their lack of
understanding and subsequent need to be ruled (Kennedy 4, 12). For Modesta and
Constantia, then, expressing anger fully and
emotionally would have meant undermining their position as rational beings
capable of choosing for themselves religious vows over marriage. If the hints
of anger that do surface indicate deeper, suppressed anger, this very act of strategic
constraint – a withdrawing into the self which creates a distinction between
inner feelings and outward comportment – adds an intangible barrier between the
sisters and their father and suitors.
- Artesia, with her bitter laughter in the face of her captors and
their terrifying death-sentence, seems to express her anger more freely than
Modesta and Constantia do. Artesia’s anger, however, is very much connected to
her body, and Artesia exercises precise and calculated control over her body. “The
royal Saxon princess”[12]
makes her body such an effective instrument of revenge against her enemies, the
Britons, that Aurelius cannot even look at her without losing his train of
thought (1.2.90-94). Aurelius’ brother, Prince Uter, finds “one look,” the
“sudden view” of Artesia, enough to strike the viewer, no matter how powerful
or driven by desire, into “astonishment” and “everlasting stand” (2.1.65-67). Unlike
the powerful Medusa here alluded to, however, Artesia’s power is more
discriminant; her body appeals to and repels only and precisely those she means
to. Artesia has little difficulty, first in isolating Aurelius and Uter (both
awestruck by her body) from Aurelius’ trusted council (who can only see her as
a witch and devil) (2.1., 2.2.), and then in wedging her body between Aurelius
and Uter, overthrowing not only the “natural love of two brothers” (Karpinska
126), but their moral sense and faculties of reason as well. When, for
instance, immediately after solemnly asking heaven’s pardon for desiring his
brother’s wife, and vowing that henceforth “She’s banisht from my bosom”
(2.2.320), the prospect of enjoying Artesia’s body freshly presents itself to
the Prince with a message and symbolic token from Artesia’s gentlewoman, Uter
does not hasten to share Artesia’s adulterous invitation with Aurelius.
Instead he decides – amusingly, given his moral condemnation of adultery, only
moments ago, as “a sin / Not to be blotted out” (2.2.318-319) – to “confer
with” Artesia, with the aim of discovering how she might be plotting the
Britons’ “destructions” (2.2.367-377). Rationalizing at length that “men wise /
By the same step by which they fell, may rise,” that “Vices are Virtues, if so
thought and seen, / And Trees with foulest roots, branch soonest green” (2.374-7),
the Prince justifies indulging in some enjoyable “vice” for the benefit of the
kingdom. This ‘reasoning’ is (almost comically) inspired by Artesia’s body, and
when the Prince finally does try to alert the King to Artesia’s treachery –
significantly not until the moment Artesia rudely shatters her bodily spell
over Uter (3.6.33-87) – Aurelius finds Artesia’s claim that Uter tried to
seduce her more plausible, since, as he informs the Prince, “I have observ’d
your passions long ere this” (3.5.89). Artesia thus achieves her “best of
wishes” (5.2.70), a wish, born out of anger, to poison Aurelius, through the
skilful use of her body and her awareness and control over how others perceive
it. Overall, she embodies the association, in early modern discourse on anger,
between anger and the body, but challenges the placement of emotions and the
body on the inferior side of a binary with the intellect and soul. For
Artesia’s body, as a fine-tool of her anger, triumphs over the Prince’s moral
resolution and reason in a way that we cannot simply dismiss as what happens
when weak bodily urges impair the intellect. Significantly, we never hear
Artesia reasoning about her plot as we do Prince Uter. Instead, her body speaks
for her, representing a controlled, rational approach that is undoubtedly the
stronger force in a sustained battle with the Prince’s reasoning skills: though
Uter is aware of the possibility of Artesia’s revenge from the beginning, over
the course of his (reasoned) indulgence in vice he does not fully penetrate the
agenda her body conceals until it is too late.
- By spitefully welcoming any death her captors can devise for her, Artesia
maintains control over her body in such a way that she eludes the physical
restraints of starvation, burial and circular wall which her captors would
impose upon her. Artesia robs her enemies of the satisfaction of inflicting
torture on her: they cannot kill her when she appropriates starvation as an
action she will perform willingly in order to “starve death when he comes for
his prey” (5.2.67). Artesia further disempowers her captors by turning their
“curses” into a “diet” she can “live upon” until the time when death will
arrive to find her body missing (68-69). Indeed, as affirmations of the success
of her revenge upon the Britons, these curses could only be welcome to the
angry Artesia. Ironically, then, Artesia’s overt spite – which she
strategically constrained up until this point – protects her from the worst physical
restraints her male captors’ intellects can invent for her, enabling her to transform
the gruesome prospect of physical starvation and burial alive into a bodily
magic act of subsistence on curses and controlled disappearance in a way that
defies logic.
- Whereas Artesia controls her body to such an extent that she defies enforced
physical restraint, Frances Fitzdottrel makes use of the social and moral
constraints of her marriage to escape the physical restraint of her body. Rather
than merely suffering her husband Fitzdottrel’s strict confinement of her, Frances appropriates that confinement as a firm ground from which she does not simply
resist the wooing Wittipol’s seductive “magic,”[13] but accepts it on her
own terms and turns it to her own ends of mental and spiritual liberation.
- Even the novice devil Pug, on his first day on earth, does not miss
the excessive restraints that Fitzdottrel, paranoid about cuckoldry, imposes on
his wife, which include imprisonment in “a backroom” inaccessible from the
street, and the interdiction of “paper, pen, and ink” (2.2.91-102). Part of
Wittipol’s seductive appeal as he is wooing Frances is his sensitivity to her
plight of stifling confinement – a sensitivity perhaps tainted by his longing
to have Frances for himself. Deploring Frances’ condition of being “Locked up
from all society or object,” and speaking with striking perceptiveness from her
perspective when her husband denies her a voice, Wittipol encourages Frances to break free from her “bondage” of marriage by becoming his lover (1.6.100-105,
156). He assures her that she can trust him not to further “entrap” her, even
as his rhetoric attempts to hedge her into adultery by presenting his “proffer”
as the only possible escape from her situation – a “proffer / Which never fair
one was so fond to lose” (170, 115-16). Frances would be “stupid, or (what’s
worse) ingrate” to pass the opportunity up – or so Wittipol contends when he
assumes the silenced Frances’ voice (174). Despite his capacity to sympathize
with Frances, Wittipol’s decision to “make your answer for you” (146), when
Fitzdottrel bars her speech is a decision to interpret her silence in a way
that suits his own desires, and in one sense, this pinning down of her silence
to an acceptance of his invitation restricts Frances as much as, if not more
than, the silence that her husband imposes.[14]
- Wittipol’s wooing words are further restrictive in that they risk
becoming entrapped, themselves, in the physical. To put it differently,
Wittipol’s words become enmeshed in the same materiality that Fitzdottrel
simply cannot see beyond when he “sells fifteen minutes of his wife’s time to
Wittipol, and thinks that merely by forbidding ‘all lip-work…melting joints and
fingers’ (I.ii.191, 199-200), he has prevented adultery” (Ostovich 167). As
Helen Ostovich observes of Fitzdottrel, “only the material world weighs with
him: words, ideas, feelings, none of these intangibles register” (167). Of
course, this is not true of Wittipol. Wittipol’s willingness to part with his
cloak, an item of considerable material value, for the fleeting chance to simply
speak to Frances demonstrates his understanding of how these “intangibles” that
Fitzdottrel misses defy his obsessive closeting of his wife. And yet, at the
climax of Wittipol’s verbal seduction, his words, in one sense “far more
arousing than any mere embrace” (Ostovich 168), in another sense pale before
the possibility of physical embrace they evoke. Wittipol assures Frances that
only his “bargain” with Fitzdottrel “binds” him from teaching “Our lips” to
“seal the happy mixture / Made of our souls” (1.6.195-198, 203), and begs her:
Do not think yet, lady,
While relying on the limitlessness of the imagination to fill in the endless possible details of those nameless “crowning courtships,” Wittipol paradoxically acknowledges limits to his imaginative words. He implies that the union of souls between himself and Frances, expressed through words, is something incomplete without the physical “seal” of a kiss. He thus admits the effectiveness of Fitzdottrel’s physical restraint of Frances even as his words penetrate it; from Wittipol’s perspective he can only partially breach Fitzdottrel’s protective barrier (at least for the time being), and he clearly finds this inadequate and unsatisfying. Indeed, he presents the physical union his words so skilfully and erotically evoke as surpassing his words. As “crowning courtships,” forms of physical connection are superior to, the ultimate end and consummation of, other forms of courtship, including Wittipol’s immaterial verbal and later musical wooing. Wittipol’s privileging of the body and physical union over spiritual and intellectual communion is further evident in his urging Frances to “Let not the sign o’ the husband fright you, lady. / But ere your spring be gone, enjoy it” (1.6.127-128) and his warning that:
But I can kiss, and touch, and laugh, and whisper,
And do those crowning courtships, too, for which
Day and the public have allowed no name. (1.6.199-202)Flowers,
The carpe diem warning Wittipol here resorts to, with its emphasis on the fleetingness of physical, seasonal beauty, significantly undermines his earlier claim of a “mixture / Made of our souls,” a connection that can only strengthen with accumulated wisdom over time. Through his very eloquent, imaginative, and erotic emphasis on his desire to connect physically with Frances, Wittipol essentially commits the inverse of Fitzdottrel’s error when Fitzdottrel assumes that once “he turns his wife about” physically, to “face this way” and “look on [him]” he can make her “forget” what has just passed with Wittipol; he can constrain her thoughts by physically restraining her body (1.6.227 SD-229). Wittipol, on the other hand, connects helping Frances escape mental isolation with freeing her body. He assumes that because he better appreciates Frances’ intellect, and because his own sentiments have more affinity with Frances’ than do those of her “sordid” (1.6.155), “asinine” (165), “devil-given” (95), “cautelous jailor” (142), and “moonling” of a husband (158), he is also far more deserving of her body. In other words, if Frances accepts their intimate “mixture” of “souls,” their mixture of bodies will necessarily follow.
Though fair, are oft but of one morning. Think,
All beauty does not last ’till autumn.
You grow old while I tell you this. And such
As cannot use the present are not wise. (1.6.128-132)
- Barbara Kreps draws attention to how, unlike Fitzdottrel, who frames
Wittipol’s fifteen minutes with his wife in terms of lending and borrowing,
Wittipol envisions establishing a permanent relationship with Frances, as
evinced by his talk of having “‘purchased’ the blessing of Frances’ eyes
[1.6.120-21]” along with the “time” “purchast” to speak with her (1.6.75, Kreps
96). Frances, however, has something even more permanent in mind than becoming
a purchase whose novelty might “not last ’till Autumn,” according to Wittipol’s
warning. With reference to Wittipol’s wooing, which, she confesses, “took me,” Frances expresses her hope to Wittipol
That whom I found the master of such language
It is telling that Frances feels it necessary to articulate her expectation that Wittipol would employ his skill “virtuously,” and to assert “’Tis counsel that I want, and honest aids: / And in this name I need you for a friend! / Never in any other” (25-27). She indirectly expresses her reservations by forcing Wittipol to prove that his offer of friendship is not merely a disguise for solely physical desires, nor does it depend upon Frances’ bodily compliance with his desires. Frances is here insisting upon a separation between body and intellect. Her emphasis on Wittipol’s mastery of language, his brain, and spirit, unmistakably privileges his immaterial powers of intellect and compassion over the physically suggestive content of some of his words – which Wittipol himself tends to privilege. Where Wittipol’s most stimulating words rely upon the real physical possibility of actualizing what the words could only hint at, Frances views intellectual exchange as an acceptable replacement for physical exchange. Following the meeting with Wittipol during which she was constrained to silence by her husband, she reflects, for instance, that Wittipol “did presume / By all the carriage of it, on my brain / For answer,” and fears he “will swear ’tis very barren / If it can yield him no return” (2.2.30-33). Here, Frances expresses her desire to show Wittipol is correct in crediting her with superior intelligence through an image of insemination and fertility. But this language is not so much erotically suggestive (like Wittipol’s), as it is suggestive of how, like physical exchange, intellectual exchange might be seen as both intimate and productive in and of itself.
That brain and spirit, for such an enterprise,
Could not but, if those succours were demanded
To a right use, employ them virtuously. (4.6.6-15)
- Francis thus rejects Wittipol’s invitations to make Fitzdottrel the
cuckold he deserves to be (1.6.179-182), while readily accepting the immaterial
help he can offer with his powers of intellect and sensitivity. She clearly
does want to engage with Wittipol in meaningful exchange, to “give” a
“requital” for his desire to help her, just “not unto [his] ends”(4.6.8-10). Frances’ reasons for refusing physical intimacy with Wittipol are moral: she asserts before
Wittipol that Fitzdottrel’s “ill / Must not make me, sire, worse” (26-27). As
Ostovich points out, “the freedom to choose virtue is quite different from the
imposition of virtue on a wife as her husband’s chattel” (166), and here, by morally
constraining herself to stay, physically, within the bounds of her marriage,
Frances appropriates her confinement, instead of simply enduring it, not unlike
Artesia’s appropriation of her burial. By choosing to physically restrain
herself to her marriage, Frances achieves a more significant freedom; she
liberates her wit from her body, in a double sense. That is, by insisting on
the separation of her body from her “Wit”-tipol, she enforces his recognition
of her mental and spiritual merits as completely independent from her physical beauty
(37-41); she achieves the possibility of a stimulating, engaging connection
with a man that is not tied to and makes no claims upon her body.
- In this achievement, Francis both accepts and transforms her name by
marriage, just as Modesta and Constantia do their birth-names. A dotterel is a
bird that is easily trapped, and not only does Fitzdottrel leap into every
imaginable trap Merecraft sets to cozen him of money, but in the way he dresses
– or restrains – his wife’s body, he sets her body up to be a trap for herself.
In addition to all the “oils,” “tinctures,” “pomatums” and so on, for the face
and skin, with which Fitzdottrel wants Frances to adorn herself (2.8.35), “in
every dressing he does study her” (1.1.18). Significantly, when Fitzdottrel
catches Pug attempting his wife, he asks, “did her silks rustling move you?”,
signalling his awareness that the apparel he imposes on her encourages illicit
urges (2.3.27). But Frances does not become absorbed in her own external
appearance like Ladies Tailbush and Eitherside, and does not fall into a trap
as her dotterel husband so often does, even though he makes it excessively easy
for her to do so, fitting her with eye-catching, sensuous garments and then
unwittingly bringing Wittipol, a suitor far worthier than himself, to her
attention. By choosing not to breach the restraints of her marriage in order to
transcend, in spirit and intellect, the confines of her body, Frances remains
the “bird” Fitzdottrel calls her (2.7.28), but instead of a dotterel, she is
closer to the bird as a conventional symbol for the soul that transcends the
cage of its body – or perhaps more accurately, the cage of the female body as
it is socially defined.
- That Frances is not entrapped by surface appearances is not the only
thing that distinguishes her from her husband. Like Artesia’s, Frances’ anger serves as a protective self-constraint within the physical restraint he
imposes on her. Whereas Fitzdottrel is seduced by the false magic of conjurors
and projectors like Merecraft, when he repeats their schemes to Frances in long-winded ramblings, they fail to enchant her. She easily deflects
Fitzdottrel’s speeches with a few lines laced with suppressed anger, as when, in
response to his delineation of all the pain and expense he incurs to have her
educated by ‘the Spanish lady,’ she finishes his claim that he has provided her
“all helps that could be had for love or money –” with “To make a fool of her”
(4.4.110-123, see also 2.3.33-60). Here, by constraining her anger to one line,
Frances effectively preserves herself from association with her husband’s
many foolish lines. Moreover, given early modern attitudes towards women’s
anger, and considering how Fitzdottrel tries Frances’ patience almost beyond
endurance, renting her out for a cloak and jeopardizing her financial security
in the pursuit of ridiculous hoaxes, Frances is likely constraining
the full extent of her anger to guard her own credibility. This constraint creates,
as it does between Modesta, Constantia, and their suitors, an intangible emotional
barrier between Frances and her husband. Significantly, this particular barrier
does not exist between Frances and Wittipol, who not only understands the frustration
and anger Frances does not openly express, but shares in it when he witnesses
from a window, but is helpless to prevent, Frances’ beating at the hands of
Fitzdottrel. Therefore, even though Fitzdottrel does his utmost to restrain his
wife as a jealously-guarded “fruit” he wants no one else to have (2.2.159),
because of Frances’ carefully constrained anger, he himself does not have full
access to her, nor do his blunders penetrate her own reputation for intelligence
and discretion.
- Devils and magicians might perform the most obvious magic in The
Devil is an Ass and The Birth of Merlin, but the magic Frances, Artesia, Modesta and Constantia practice is the most impressive. With the
exception of Pug, who ends his first day on earth doubly confined, in prison,
and “tied […] up” in “the unlucky carcass of a cutpurse, / Wherein I could do
nothing” (5.6.31-36), these devils and magicians are free to speak their minds
without fearing consequences (as when Anselme gives his opinion about Aurelius’
marriage), just as they are free to wander and practice their magic where they
please, whether on the battlefield, at court, or back and forth between hell
and earth. They clearly do not operate under the same physical restraints and social
constraints these four female characters do. Unlike Pug, however, Frances,
Artesia, and the sisters are in no need of rescue. Instead, to return to that
image in the masque of the hags tied to the queens’ chariots, each female
character turns some form of constraint or restraint that existing gender codes
require – from the constraint of ‘unruly’ emotions to the restraint of the body
within a dull marriage – into defiant energy, extra fuel, carefully managed and
kept from men’s control, but used to advance the women’s interests, just as the
witches advance the chariots.
- And yet restraint is never affirmed as a permanent condition, whether chosen or imposed. Modesta and Constantia perceive the restraint of their bodies from worldly life as one step closer to ultimate spiritual liberation after death. Though Frances chooses not to breach the physical bounds of her marriage, there is a good chance that before long these bounds will not be an issue. As Ostovich argues, Frances’ many similarities to Mary Wroth, who deferred “the consummation of her love for Pembroke until after her husband’s death,” and Fitzdottrel’s “sickbed finale” symbolically suggesting “that he may not be around for long,” indicate that Frances could soon be a widow with “the determination to decide her own future as a lover” (177). Finally, the ambiguity of Artesia’s final claim that she will “starve death” leaves open the mysterious possibility that she will elude death entirely. Indeed, throughout the play Artesia’s body has displayed impressive powers of enchantment, and this last statement could well be an expression of her confidence in her body to escape her triple confinement through means other than appropriating her own starvation and leaving an emaciated corpse. Overall, then, just as the hags roped to the chariots can be read as the queens’ own sequestered, alternative versions of themselves, the magic of these four female characters ultimately reveals that the concept of restraint itself is an illusion they are all willing to manipulate as long as others try to suppress them.
But their "liberty" is an illusion; they are really tied to Merecraft’s costly, phoney schemes, which they repeatedly fall for, and they are very much defined by and dismissed because of their extravagant attire and cosmetics – which they spend their money on simply because others assure them it is the fashion.[6] Tailbush and Eitherside are entirely unaware of how Merecraft is using them for personal profit, and their obsession with the latest fashions – so encouraged by Merecraft – actually hinders their social advancement by blocking advantageous connections with Wittipol and Manly. Both are respectable gentlemen and useful friends to have, as demonstrated by their efforts to protect Frances Fitzdottrel from financial ruin at the hands of her husband.Eitherside We may have our dozen visitors at once make love t’us.
Tailbush And before our husbands! (4.4.92-94)
Notes
